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How to count every language in India (2018)

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Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#111

Post by cafard »

hassancf wrote: post #99
ponker wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well very old languages like Tamil have a very ancient person with whom a modern speaker could have a mutually intelligible conversation. An English speaker could not speak English with someone from 1000 years ago but a Tamil speaker could.

Arabic. I can read/write Arabic texts from 1400+ years ago. As could anyone who studied Arabic at school... Now that I think of it, that’s pretty damn amazing! I can’t say the same for French or English.

Well, the Koran had an enormous stabilizing influence, didn't it?

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#112

Post by muffinman26 »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #55
ponker wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well measuring it exactly is impossible but relatively is easy. For example Tamil has been much more static than Greek which has been much more static than English over the last 1000 years.

Static how? Obviously there is no ancient audio. Is ancient Tamil writing readable by modern Tamil readers?

While we don't have ancient audio, we can learn something about how a language was spoken by analyzing poetry with strict pronunciation rules. There's research in Chinese (I believe the original researcher was named Chen Li) to reconstruct how Chinese words used to be pronounced by analyzing poems that were supposed to rhyme but no longer do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Chinese_phonology

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#113

Post by valarauko »

furyroad wrote: post #107
naruvimama wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This politicization and purification drive has made tamil to some extent less usable. Far from preserving tamil, many in the current generation can not read, write or understand tamil. It is lacking in modern technical literature and comics. Most kids in school memorize tirukural, without understanding a word. Pushing the burden on preserving old language on kids is actually driving them from the language itself.

> This politicization and purification drive has made tamil to some extent less usable. Far from preserving tamil, many in the current generation can not read, write or understand tamil. Can you elaborate on how you concluded that Tamil has become less usable? Citing sources will be helpful.

I have to kind of agree with the parent comment. I lived in Madurai for 3 years, where the people take great pride in the language. Your anecdote of little kids being able to comprehend the Thirukural was oft repeated, though I failed to see it in action. There were couplets from the Thirukural painted inside the city bus, and not once could one of my Tamil classmates actually grok the text. As a non-Tamil who learnt the script, I could read the words about as well as they could, transcribed as it is in the modern Tamil script. They clearly understood more than I did (which was close to none), but not enough to comprehend the text in any meaningful way. They could understand a word or two of the couplet, and kind of guess the meaning of the text. This was a far cry from the trope of 3 year olds reciting the Thirukural. For context, these were Masters students, for whom Tamil was the primary language. In my class of 15 people, there were perhaps two or three who could comprehend these texts with any level of competency.

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#114

Post by valarauko »

Arnavion wrote: post #31
quadrifoliate wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With so many, where do you draw the line? The whole issue of language v/s dialect is a complex one; but I have adjusted to the one in this popular article [1]: if you speak a language and can enter into a conversation with a speaker of a variation on that language relatively easily, it qualifies as a dialect. > A Mandarin-speaker can no more “adjust” to Cantonese than a Swede could “adjust” to German. Most of the w…

That would make Hindi and Urdu dialects of each other. I'm not saying this is necessarily right or wrong; it's a landmine I don't want to touch :)

It's more appropriate to think of Hindi (Rajbhashya/Khariboli) & Urdu as different registers of the same language.

For example, a lawyer & a rapper might both compose their works in English, while adopting a register & jargon geared towards their respective audiences. Their works might very well be largely incomprehensible to each others target audiences.

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#115

Post by valarauko »

yumraj wrote: post #59
quadrifoliate wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With so many, where do you draw the line? The whole issue of language v/s dialect is a complex one; but I have adjusted to the one in this popular article [1]: if you speak a language and can enter into a conversation with a speaker of a variation on that language relatively easily, it qualifies as a dialect. > A Mandarin-speaker can no more “adjust” to Cantonese than a Swede could “adjust” to German. Most of the w…

Bhojpuri, Maithili, Haryanwi, Braj, Bundelkhandi, dialects from Rajasthan, Himachal and so and so forth, and I'll say even Khari boli are all dialects of Hindi. We may not be able to have a fluent conversation, but for most part we'll understand the context and will be able to speak. In fact Hindi dialects change every 100km or so I'll say in the Hindi belt. Punjabi, Gujrati, Marathi and others (picking from areas ne…

More likely, people speaking different dialects will adopt a standard register to communicate with each other. For example, I have seen Himachali speakers from neighbouring districts communicate with each other exclusively using Khariboli Hindi, rather than their native Himachali dialects.

This is probably true of most large, diverse languages. Each dialect has drifted sufficiently far from each other than while it is possible to communicate with other dialects, it's most convenient to use the shared formalized standard register. So while a Malvani speaker can largely comprehend the dialect of somebody from Gadchiroli, more often both speakers will switch to the standard Marathi register they learnt in school.

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#116

Post by cafard »

ponker wrote: post #48
srtjstjsj wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that measured?

Well measuring it exactly is impossible but relatively is easy. For example Tamil has been much more static than Greek which has been much more static than English over the last 1000 years.

English was not really English 1000 years ago, was it? I think a Dane would find Old English/Anglo-Saxon easier reading than an untrained native English speaker would.

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#117

Post by valarauko »

yumraj wrote: post #77
mistrial9 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm American here - but I vaguely recall.. Gurmukhi is a variation on Punjabi, used by Sikhs for religious purposes, but Urdu is a 'persianized' version of Hindi (?) Checking wikipedia, it mentions a "Punjabi diaspora family of languages." These distinctions seem understandable and interesting to me, of European descent and non-political. thanks yumraj, for the many posts here today on this, it feels important at som…

Gurmukhi is the script used to write Punjabi, at least in India. It was created by a Sikh Guru. Link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurmukhi Interestingly, Pakistan has a state called Punjab where Punjabi is the main language, but I’m not sure what script they use. Regarding Hindi and Urdu, I found the wikipedia page to at least be informative. Link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi%E2%80%93Urdu_controver...

Pakistani Punjabi uses the Shahmukhi script, which is based on the Perso-Arabic script.

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#118

Post by valarauko »

bakul wrote: post #81
yumraj wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bhojpuri, Maithili, Haryanwi, Braj, Bundelkhandi, dialects from Rajasthan, Himachal and so and so forth, and I'll say even Khari boli are all dialects of Hindi. We may not be able to have a fluent conversation, but for most part we'll understand the context and will be able to speak. In fact Hindi dialects change every 100km or so I'll say in the Hindi belt. Punjabi, Gujrati, Marathi and others (picking from areas ne…

Gujarati has its own script, fairly similar to Devanagari but without the horizontal bar above letters and a few more changes. Marathi uses Devanagari. I believe both Urdu and Hindi came from Hindustani which was derived from Khari Boli.

On the issue of scripts, the matter was more fluid some generations ago. Different people would adopt different scripts in different circumstances, and it was the British push for standardization that settled the matter.

For example, when the British took Sindh, they found that officials of the erstwhile Nawab administration used the Persian script, while merchants used the Khudabadi landa script. Women and priests, however, largely used the Devanagari script. The British adopted the Persian script for Sindhi since the clerks they absorbed used it.

A similar story played out with Marathi. From the time of the Marathas till as late as the 1920s, Marathi was written formally in the Modi (ie, twisted) script. The British pushed for the adoption of the Devanagari script, since it would simplify logistics at printing presses.

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#119

Post by yumraj »

valarauko wrote: post #117
yumraj wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gurmukhi is the script used to write Punjabi, at least in India. It was created by a Sikh Guru. Link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurmukhi Interestingly, Pakistan has a state called Punjab where Punjabi is the main language, but I’m not sure what script they use. Regarding Hindi and Urdu, I found the wikipedia page to at least be informative. Link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi%E2%80%93Urdu_controver...

Pakistani Punjabi uses the Shahmukhi script, which is based on the Perso-Arabic script.

Thanks. So, Punjabi must be one of those rare languages that is written in two entirely different scripts by roughly equal population sizes.

Are there any other examples of such a language?

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#120

Post by vram22 »

bodhiandpysics1 wrote: post #91
vram22 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and I have no idea where to begin explaining that it's nothing like that (I have studied Sanskrit and Hindi in school for multiple years, and can understand a good amount of Marathi and Tamil.) You can say this - I think it is true, not quite verified (partly heard from older relatives, partly deduction based on observing similarities in the mentioned languages' vocabularies): Sanskrit came first - thousands of yea…

Bengali is very much a descendent of Sanskrit. Assamese (and Oriya) is essentially a somewhat distant dialect of Bengali. Most languages of Asia that aren't part of the Chinese world (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and modern Vietnamese) have tons of Sanskrit or Pali (or both) in them. Tamil has lots of sanskrit in it (good examples are naka meaning finger nail, singa meaning lion, ampala from ambara meaning sky) it just…

> Bengali is very much a descendent of Sanskrit

Yes, that is nearly same as what I said above, except I said "likely", because I was not sure, not being a language expert. And that "likely" applied to the other languages I mentioned too, in that sentence.

Edit: Actually, I am (still anecdotally) pretty sure of it for at least Hindi and Marathi, because both of them have too many words which are the same as, or derived from Sanskrit, for it to be a mistake.

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